


ten shades into nevermore (and no end in sight)

by Neko-no-Tsuki (LunaKat)



Series: Barking Up The Right Tree (InuKag Week 2020) [2]
Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Tragedy, Bad Ending, Dark, F/M, Inukag Week 2020, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24629071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/Neko-no-Tsuki
Summary: For InuKag Week 2020. Day 2: Loyalty/PurpleKagome breathes in. Breathes out. The air tastes like tragedy.
Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha
Series: Barking Up The Right Tree (InuKag Week 2020) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779043
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	ten shades into nevermore (and no end in sight)

_i. limbo_

It is storming.

It is _always_ storming. Clouds, purple-black like bruises and rot and sorrow, churn endlessly above. No wind, though it would sound like screaming. No rain, though it would burn like acid. No lightning or thunder, no reassurance of a natural world. Only darkness, deep and amaranthine.

Kagome breathes in. Breathes out. The air tastes like tragedy.

Sometimes (rarely) the storm clears for a moment. Sometimes the sky unlocks and showers of _hurts-to-look-at_ light blind her like a benediction. It is those times when her arrows strike true, when she tears Naraku’s flesh to ribbons and sends his hodgepodge body scattered across this barren hellscape they call the World and he disappears to some dark, damp corner to recuperate for their next battle. It is those times when she has the luxury of silence, of throwing her bow back over her shoulders and relishing in the feeling returning to her fingertips.

To say these are respites is a not-quite lie, in the same way that saying she is alive is a not-quite truth. This is not _life_ as much as it is _existence_ , as it is _survival_. And these are not so much _respites_ as they are _breaths-between-battles_.

In those pink pauses between purple impurity, light rains down on her lone figure, her solitary silhouette stranded on a false horizon. The darkness behind her eyelids blares ruby instead of amethyst, scarlet as the shadow that used to chase her heels and draw a stardust-silver sword in her defense.

_“I’m coming with you.”_

_“You can’t—”_

_“The **hell** I can’t! I said I’d protect you with my life, didn’t it? That’s **not** changin’ now!”_

But nothing red remains red, here. And before long, the clouds roll back in.

_ii. lust_

Naraku doesn’t bleed red when she pierces him.

Maybe he did, once, but he doesn’t anymore. Nothing that is red remains red, here—because red is too vibrant a color, too much like passion, like willpower, like _defiance_. And the Jewel does not keep that which it cannot use.

They are on thin ice as it is, her and her enemy. The Jewel was exhausted, desperate, on its very last legs, when it shackled them to its endless battlefield. Kagome is as much a replacement for Kikyo as she is for Midoriko, because the Jewel asks only two things of its avatar for wickedness—that he be a monster of his own making, and that he love with the intensity to kill her over and over and over and never be sick of it.

But Kagome is not the keeper of Naraku’s forsaken humanity. She is Kagome, Kagome (the bird in a cage), and no one else. Naraku chases after her with a delirium in his eyes, with an illusion in his vision, with a resigned desperation wrought in his disgusting bones.

When her arrow brings blood to the surface, it traces toxic rivulets that look too much like miasma (red becomes purple instead). He mocks her failure to kill him with a smile dyed mauve, with lips painted almost-black, with hair swirling around his bone-pale face like a smoking halo against an indigo storm. And oh, he is every bit the devil that the Jewel would cast him as, irredeemable and despicable and any trace of a human heart blackened beyond recognition by vileness and vices—if only the weakness in his abominable heart weren’t named _Kikyo_.

Their hatred is real and deep and endless in all the right ways, but the Jewel needs _more_ than darkness. It needs a light, a glimmer of false hope, to seduce the unsuspecting. It needs Kagome to be _loved_ as much as she is hated, to be _wanted_ as much as she is rejected.

But Naraku does not _love_ Kagome, does not _want_ Kagome, does not _need_ Kagome, and so—

_“Stay with me?”_

_“Always.”_

—the Jewel found another way to sate its need.

_iii. gluttony_

As a whole, eternity is too great. In pieces, it is easier to swallow.

Kagome has taught herself how to mark time in intervals of _violet-violence_ and _pink-pauses_. Her sentence is served in the fractured spaces between the sweet platitude of victory and the sour sting of defeat, between false failures and even falser successes.

Defeat tastes rotten on her tongue, bathes her whole mouth in the cloying lilac of decay. The mountain range where she takes shelter, a rigid thing forged of glittering amethyst and false promises, is no more real than the storm churning above (and it is _always_ storming). But even though she knows that the wound will be gone after the purple-blackness takes her, that Naraku’s deadly strikes carry no threat of fatality anymore, that _eternity_ will continue to shove itself down her throat—it still burns, still sings to agony’s tune. And she still smothers back whimpers and tears as she presses a palm to the hole in her stomach.

Burgundy blood (not red, nothing red remains red, it becomes purple-stained instead) spills dark-hot-alive-but-not between her fingers. She bites back a sob while pressing the back of her head against the rockface and trying to drown out the pain.

It is times like this, on the cusp of dying-but-not, that she feels the absence more keenly, and she grieves in all the ways she has forced herself to forget for her own sanity. It is times like this that she can imagine strong arms circling her shoulders, pulling her close to a warm chest with a heartbeat thudding proud and valiant through half-human ribs. That his phantom is an almost-tactile thing, a fairytale that leaped from the pages just for her, her knight in shining scarlet (but scarlet doesn’t _stay_ scarlet). And she allows the tears to slip free from her eyes, trace salty trails down her cheeks and drip off the curve of her jaw, far away from lips that could kiss them away.

_“Are you alright?”_

_“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”_

_“You don’t **look** fine.”_

_“...I’m fine. Really.”_

Miasma seeps through her veins until there are bruise-lines forking her skin and the blood pooling at her feet is stained indigo. Once the poison sinks itself into her brave, garnet heart (red never lasts), the beating stills within her ribs. For a nigh-eternity, Kagome lays painted in vicious violet, dreaming in her death.

It is storming when she wakes again. It is _always_ storming.

Eternity in pieces is still eternity—and even in pieces, it’s too much for one person to swallow.

_iv. greed_

There are times when silver glitters through the amaranthine clouds.

They are rare things, more precious than any wish-upon-a-shooting-star or fairytales-without-an-ever-after. They are more precious even than the Shikon slivers that she used to hunt (an eternity ago) after she shattered the goddamn thing into a million pieces (shame it didn’t stay that way).

A fever ignites in Kagome’s bones, her blood, the very sinew that binds her body together. With a crimson headache (crimson like passion, like willpower, like _defiance_ ) pounding against her temples, she draws her bow with a newfound fervor.

One luxury of eternity is that her arrows never run out. Even as she fires projectile after projectile, slicing the air open along fault-lines of pure-pink-priestess-power, her quiver never empties. There is always another weapon waiting for her, the fletching brushing against her fingers sharp enough that they would cut if she weren’t so practiced and calloused. Without so much as a word of warning—with only the cold and solemn mercilessness that is a woman on a mission, a woman who crossed Time as though it a trifle and has every intention of shattering the World—she fires and fires and fires until Naraku is nothing but sickly ribbons of scattered flesh.

While her enemy spits curses that are more lovely to the ear than even death, Kagome breaks into a run.

She is manic as she sprints through bruise-purple miasma, half-wild and almost-mad as she gasps until her lungs are stained lavender with her recklessness. It is not long before she snatches the silver star from the churning sky, but by then she is coughing so hard her vision blazes indigo-black. And without even stopping to listen to the scream of her heart in her ears, she takes off like her life depends upon it (because it does).

Naraku is snarling after her while he regenerates, but she doesn’t slow. Her treasure cuts her hand open on sharp edges of fang-forged steel and has her palm painted dark (with a disappointment-of-red), but she doesn’t let go.

_“You need to go. **Now**.”_

_“I won’t.”_

_“Kagome—”_

_“I’m not going anywhere.”_

The Jewel’s anger is a tactile thing, pressing against her ribs and threatening to pop them out of place. But she ignores it in favor of making off with her fortune like the thief she has become, desperate to steal some long-forgotten hope.

_v. anger_

Tucked in a corner so far from the battlefield that not even Naraku knows it exists, there is a cave of heaven wrapped in Hell.

At first glance, it is as unremarkable as the old dry well that used to carry her along Time’s tide. Crudely constructed, carved out from a cliff-face that flickers in and out of reality, because nothing good (nothing _red_ ) survives here. But the longer you look at it, this refuge away from warzones and mutually-assured-destruction, the more sinister it becomes.

Rather than neutral grey, lilac is slaked through the rock (everything is purple here, purple, purple, fucking _purple_ ), as though miasmic malice itself has calcified into living stone. There is something almost hungry in the way the entrance yawns, like an open maw inviting you down into its hungry gullet. The mouth grows teeth, sets of long and jagged stalagmite-stalactite-fangs best for lining the jaws of famished beasts. Lavender moss tips them in sickly phosphorescence, not unlike remnant blood from a previous meal. Slime drips down from the ceiling in slow streams of sticky periwinkle-poison. Darkness lives inside, deep and pulsing and purple, roiling in synchrony with the amaranthine storm.

Snarling, deep and guttural and bloodlust-blind, bounces off the gloom-laden walls. It chills to bone, unless you’re used to it.

Kagome runs her thumb along the cold steel shard. This piece must have once made up the sharp edge of the blade that could cut through wind and barriers and swirling vortexes and even the rifts of space itself. Her blood stains the metal, burgundy rather than red. There is no red, here.

In this world, red either darkens into violet or lightens into rose, but it does not stay. It mixes, it darkens, its original hue gets lost. Nothing stays pure here.

_“Goddamn **bitch**! Lemme out **right now** , you—”_

_“I’m sorry, I can’t, I promised—”_

_“I’ll **kill** you, you fucking—”_

_“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”_

Another round of snarling greets her, lovely as a mother’s lullaby (it has been so long that Kagome has thought of home). She peers into the roiling obscurity, sighing with the knowledge that she has kept him waiting long enough. Too long, perhaps. Somehow, she’s begun to dread as much as she hopes.

As she marches headlong into her piece of _heaven-hell-refuge-damnation_ , her grip on the shard is as firm and unyielding as the promise she made on Tessaiga’s hilt—the very first piece she recovered.

_vi. heresy_

It is storming when she emerges again.

It is _always_ storming. _Always always always_. Kagome cannot remember a World beyond this barren hellscape, cannot remember how the sun felt on her face or the moon look at midnight. Eternity, even divided into easy-to-swallow pieces, is still too much for a single person. It is a sin in and of itself.

Sometimes she tries to remember how it all began— _final battles_ and _wrong wishes_ and _i’m sorrysorrysorry_ —and her mind always goes back to that first moment, to the ancient boughs of that holy tree and the boy bathed in crimson courage who she _misses-misses-misses_ with every space between her heartbeats.

As though punishing her for the derailment of her thoughts, the Jewel calls. It demands things of her as well—virtue without compromise, star-studded bones, utter devotion to a war-torn existence. It demands her resignation in the name of the Greater Good. And if she does not give it, wholehearted and selfless to the point of stupidity and _nothing-left-to-lose_ , then she is flawed. Then she is punished.

What a crime to be human. To be a woman first and a miko second. Midoriko would be ashamed.

When she finally succumbs to the pull, Naraku is already there, waiting. He always is. It’s like he doesn’t fight it, the way she does. But Naraku has stopped bleeding red—and Kagome pities him, sometimes.

Their battle is brief but intense (too short, but ardent enough to appease). Sometimes she thinks he _lets_ her win, though she has no proof. And if so, she isn’t sure if it’s a defiance he dares to indulge or if she’s just wearing him down faster than he is her. Not that it really matters, in the end—her arrow still strikes true.

His retreat takes the storm with it, the roiling mauve darkness chases at his heels like a lost soul seeking salvation. It disappears with him over the horizon and reveals a placid pink sky.

She looks up, knowing she should relish her triumph, but doesn’t.

_“Just hang on a little longer, okay? It’ll all work out._

_“Can you understand me?_

_“...Inuyasha?”_

These victories are not _hers_. The Jewel does not keep what it cannot use, and all it needs of her is the holiness brimming in her blood. She is meant to be a pillar of all that is _saintly_ and _selfless_ and _good_. Someone who _sacrifices_ all that they have for the _chance_ to do what is _right_. All she needs (is _supposed_ _to_ need) is the brief successes, the pure pink skies, the _respites_ that are really just _breaths-between-battles_ in clever disguise.

And anything less (anything more) has been stolen as “punishment” for her sin—for the humanity she dares to indulge.

Midoriko devoted herself to the Greater Good, etched her very existence in this endless eternity, and was celebrated as a saint.

But Kagome, Kagome, the bird in the cage, only cares about one good—and getting him _back_.

_vii. violence_

Sometimes, Kagome is convinced that the Jewel hates her.

It doesn’t speak anymore, not with the lilac-sweet whispers that goaded a (wrong) wish from her breast. Its will is silent now, making itself known in the churning miasmic clouds and the poison staining her every breath. But she can _feel_ its displeasure as she can feel her own heartbeat, knows that it disapproves of the defiance she makes known in every step and every breath and every moment where she drags her feet a little too long when it demands she fight again.

Her rebellions are small ones. Elongated pauses at the cusp of the battlefield. Planting her feet in the ground when the pull comes. Hasty retreats from a fight she knows she’ll lose, instead of staying and dying for a cause she despises.

She glimpses eyes in the hellish heavens, sometimes. Echoes of sapphire-on-scarlet from her nightmares. They sneer at her.

She tries to forget for as long as she can.

If he were here, he would let her leech from his strength until her bones didn’t tremble in place. He would help her build her mosaic of little rebellions in the space between her ribs. His silver sword would be the sentinel to her blood-hued bastion, and everything would be scarlet as salvation instead of burgundy (tainted will, tainted passion, tainted defiance).

But red doesn’t stay red, here, and Kagome’s anger is that of the wrongfully condemned.

So she builds her bastion in blood and bone, an unrelenting wall between her heart and Hell, because the purple can come battering at her bones but _she will not fall_. She faces Naraku with a will that the Jewel would have had her surrendered long ago, because she fights as Kagome, _Kagome_ , the bird in the cage always looking for a way. And she goes through the motions of a battle she never asked to fight, endless and vicious and violet ever-afters—but she does so for reasons that have nothing to do with Naohi.

Once, Naraku loomed over her, sweet as slaughter, and warned her, “The battle is already lost, Kagome.”

Kagome nocks another arrow.

Sometimes, in her death-dreams, she sees sapphire-on-scarlet—she sees the blue bursting from its boundaries, spilling into the scarlet and staining everything _purplepurplepurple_.

_“Does it hurt? Ah, sorry, stupid question. Of course it hurts.”_

The arrows takes Naraku’s head clean off, and it would shocking and disturbing if she hadn’t seen it a hundred times before. Without flinching, she watches the rest of his body devolve into lavender smoke and ash the color of bruises. Watches as all the remnants drift off to a distant horizon that reluctantly accepts a soul so vile. Following it, the clouds peel back like hide being carved cleanly from the bone, and beneath it, the pure-pink sky presents her with a mocking smile in return for a job well done.

But her gaze remains fixed on the bruised horizon, on the retreating ripple of the storm. Because the thing is, the awful truth, is that it only _retreats_. Not dissipates or dissolves or disappears, just goes somewhere beyond her sight.

It is _always_ storming—even if she can’t see it.

_viii. fraud_

When Naraku particularly feels like fucking with her, he takes Inuyasha’s face.

Kagome hates her enemy most, those times. After all, the last (and only, as far as she knows, but there’s no accounting for those fifty years) time he wore that false face is when he twisted Kikyo’s heart with the malice of the murdered. There was a purpose then, a scheme that hinged upon the disguise, and it was understandable even as it was unforgiveable. But now, there is no need for such carefully-crafted deceptions—their battles are straightforward, a simplistic waging of war, fulfilling a need rather than indulging a pleasure.

Maybe she could understand if it was to hurt her, but that isn’t it, either. Because she has other festering wounds to exploit, like the friends and family she’ll never see again—but it is only Inuyasha he sullies. And sometimes she wonders if his sick obsession of Kikyo has spilled over into the man who she loved over him.

Or maybe the Jewel is just using him to remind her, how every space between heartbeats is marked by _loved_ and _lost_ and _all you have left_.

The imposture flashes a fanged grin as he circles her, a mockery of that cocky smirk. Everything about him is purposefully off, from the way his beautiful face is free from stripes to the way his eyes are clear as the day they first met. He looks just like Inuyasha-from-before—and it takes everything Kagome has not to charge over there and break her bow between those lying liquid-honey eyes.

“You still miss him? Foolish girl.”

He taunts her with his own voice. There was a time, once, when he took on Inuyasha’s voice too—his coarse tenor and rough vernacular and cocky bluster—but he doesn’t anymore. Maybe Naraku can’t remember what he sounded like, either.

“You should forget him. He’s gone.” And then—and then the imposture looks at her with a pity so close to genuine it makes her _sick_. “There’s no getting him back.”

Naraku, Kagome muses bitterly, was rather aptly named. He is a monster that takes and takes and takes, that amalgamates the innocents into his sinful body. Much in the same way that all that enters Hell is destined to become part of it.

She fires her arrows with her eyes closed.

After a few volleys, one must hit, because a snarl of pain ripples through the barren hellscape they now call the World. She opens her eyes just in time to watch the imposture’s stolen silhouette morph back into Naraku. Watch as the mockery of the fire-rat robes fills with purple poison, watches as the once-beautiful crimson is corrupted into burgundy and then further and further until only noxious miasma remains.

 _“Please, please, please,_ _I can’t do this on my own,_ _just come back, please, just **come back to me** —”_

They lie to you in art class. They tell you that the marriage between red (like _loved_ ) and blue (like _lost_ ) is what creates purple (like _all you have left_ ), but Kagome knows the truth now. Purple is just a red slaked in darkness, just a red that lost its nobility, just a red that’s been turned against you.

Purple is just a red that isn’t allowed to remain red anymore, because _all that enters Hell is destined to become part of it_.

_ix. treachery_

Kagome doesn’t bleed red when she is cut.

There was a time, once, when she did. There was a time when her blood ran so red it sent sparks through her marrow, when the heart in her chest throbbed scarlet to a hero’s tune. There was a time when she had a garnet shadow chasing her heels and amber eyes to look at her as though she were the whole world and the flame blazing in their chests was a matching rich, redolent ruby. There was a time when the love in her breast was an unfiltered red, was untouched and untainted and apologetically crimson (like passion, like will, like _defiance_ ).

But one cannot fight darkness and remain red. Darkness infects, like a contagion into the blood, sweet and spreading. Red darkens into purple, slow and inevitable. And their red was a fated string that bound them together, so when he Fell, her own descent began.

She can’t remember what it was, that enraged the Jewel so. What made it brand her as a traitor, when Kagome could not betray that which she made no promises. But she _does_ remember how it stole into his heart, violet as the violence in the storm above her head, and ate away at his valiance.

She remembers how it tried to take him—how she wouldn’t let it. How she _still_ won’t.

Now she bleeds burgundy (tainted red), and the air tastes like tragedy.

_“I guess it’s my turn to save you, now, huh?”_

Naraku knows. Of course he knows, he acts more on the Jewel’s behalf than she ever would. He knows that the Jewel does not keep that which it does not need, and that her _defiance_ is absolutely not. And he knows what it is like for the Jewel to steal a love, and she thinks he pities her.

But Kagome is not Kikyo and neither is Inuyasha, and one is dead and the other can still be saved, and she does _not_ want sympathy from monsters.

Another fight. Another moment of indigo and darkness and bruises on once-red hearts. Another arrow launched, another blow ducked, another wound delivered. Kagome draws her bowstring back and her fingers are bloody from doing it a thousand times already. There is not a moment of red to be found, in moments like this. Just burgundy and bitterness and bad blood gone stale.

Against the storm (it is _always_ storming), she notices a cliff-face. It fades in and out of existence, the stone stained dreaded purple, because nothing pure can remain, here.

With a gasp, she realizes where they are.

Her arrow abandoned, she turns hard on her heel and takes off, sprinting-skidding through a ground dark with mud and poison, in the other direction. They are too close to heaven—and she will not invite Hell upon its doorstep.

As she broaches the battlefield’s boundaries, Naraku’s shadow surging indigo-dark behind her, a nameless pressure visits her throat. It is abrupt and crushing, it leaves her gasping on the ground but is gone the next moment. It is a warning, an admonishment. It is a command to finish the battle.

But Kagome cannot betray that to which she made no promises, and a promise on Tessaiga’s hilt is more precious than any jewel.

It is not until she has crested a second hill that she realizes Naraku has not followed. Panting, lungs aching, her uniform slaked in burgundy (tainted red), she turns to face her enemy-ever-after. His form is no more than a smear against the amaranthine storm, a spot of darkness and death and bruising against the barren hellscape they now call the World. Somehow, even though the distance between them yawns purple as rot and sorrow, she cannot help but feel as though he is staring right at her.

For a long, terrible moment, she thinks he knows.

But Naraku makes no move to investigate the now-faded cliff-face in the distance. Instead, he calls after her.

Here’s what he says: “He doesn’t deserve your devotion, Kagome.”

Here’s what she thinks he means: _Nothing red remains red, here—it becomes purple instead._

_x. tomb of lucifer_

It is storming outside.

It is _always_ storming outside.

Her legs are aching from her earlier sprint, throbbing a protest at being crossed over the cavern floor. The meager light is gauzy, a purplish supposed-to-be pink, and the gloom is stained with a harsh, all-consuming lilac that makes the darkness under her eyelids throb. Somewhere beyond sight is the trickle of tainted water, of liquid life laced with lavender poison. Phosphorescent periwinkle blooms across the walls in mossy smears.

Her breaths are choppy, half-panting and rough from her run. They echo off the walls of her Hell-stained heaven. Kagome breathes in. Breathes out.

The air tastes like tragedy.

There is something absolutely blasphemous in his beauty. His face is half-concealed beneath his bangs, but the curve of his jaw looks exactly as smooth and strong as she always remembers it being, with no traces of starvation daring to sharpen his angles. Acid ate away at the collar of his robes long ago, leaving blackened fringes that expose the definition in his clavicle and the seemingly-indestructible beads that have long since lost their divine blessing. The ears she’s always adored are pressed flat against his scalp, practically invisible if she didn’t know where to look, and still as invitingly soft as day one. There are darkened, matted patches in his hair now, but it still streams over his shoulders with the silver of a corona crowning a saint’s brow. He is on his knees before her, not unlike a sinner bowed before a holy altar, seeking salvation and sipping Grace from the stars, and Tessaiga’s moss-covered sheath lays half-rotted nearby. With his arms spread out behind him as they are, pinned back while his body sags forward and his sleeves hanging in frayed tatters, it almost looks as though a pair of ragged wings were bursting beatifically from his back.

Those robes that once blazed so proudly crimson look bruise-purple in the darkness, because _nothing red can stay red_. Claws that use to tear evil apart are now too long, still caked in old slaughter. Arrows humming with holy power pin his wrists in place. Blood paints the stone in half-dried rivulets too dark for the color to be made out.

Slowly, Kagome rises to her feet. Her shoe broaches a periwinkle puddle and sends noisy ripples across the surface.

An ear twitches. He half-raises his head. A cerulean-on-crimson eye glares at her through platinum bangs. The fangs poking free from his lips gleam milky through the gloom. His cheekbones are marred by lurid, livid, _loving_ lilac.

Her guardian angel, broken by the Fall.

“Did I keep you waiting?” she asks.

A vicious snarl answers her.

She smiles apologetically. Her bow and quiver are tucked into a corner, right next to the half-completed puzzle that is Tessaiga’s silver blade. It seems to mock her sometimes, the great fang that could cut through wind and barriers and vortexes and even Hell, but broke trying to cut Fate. Even once she has all the pieces, forging it into a weapon once more will be an entirely different battle.

It takes only three large strides to close the distance between them. He lunges at her, snapping unsuccessfully at empty air, those elongated fangs just narrowly missing the tip of her nose. She doesn’t flinch. Without fear, she reaches out to run her thumb along his left cheekbone, and the force of his growling makes his skin hum almost pleasantly. Unbidden, she remembers something she heard once, when she was Kagome-from-before, about how a cat will purr when its nerves are stressed and not just when showing lazy affection—but then, he’s not a cat, and this is not purring. This is not affection or stress or anything but the anger of the wrongfully condemned making his skin vibrate with the sheer force of his fury.

“Naraku doesn’t know where you are,” she tells him, though she isn’t sure how much he understands her, anymore. “For some reason, the Jewel hasn’t told him. I’m starting to wonder if it wants to. Or, if it even can.”

His response is to clamp his fangs onto her wrist. _Hard_. Hard enough that to find bone.

Blood flowers around his jaws, hot as alive-but-not and burgundy as not-red-enough. Kagome winces at the pain, but not enough as she knows she should. Resignedly, she realizes that she’ll probably bleed out from this wound later, collapse against the cavern walls painted in her own inadequacy, dead and dreaming and waiting for eternity to be shoved down her throat again. Oh well. At least she can catch a moment’s rest.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you alone for so long.”

The growling in his throat vibrates through her sinew. If he wanted to, he could probably divorce her hand from her wrist in a shower of viscera—but he doesn’t, and maybe that means something.

She reaches out to cup his other cheek in her free hand. It never fails to amaze her how warm his skin is, how the youki beneath his bones blazes like an internal fire. She wonders if it is hellfire or the regular kind, but she thinks she already knows the answer. All that enters Hell is destined to become part of it.

Those sapphire irises flash to her, primal and wild and wary. He doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t release her, but he doesn’t crush her bones in his jaws, either.

“Everything’s going to be okay. I promise.” With her hand over one cheek, and the other facing away from her from the angle of the grip he has on her wrist, she can almost pretend those horrible stripes aren’t there. That he isn’t lost and needs to be found again. That the Jewel didn’t leech the red from his heart and leave her with only _violet-violence_.

Warm breath cools the blood gushing from her wound. He is blinking at her without comprehension, perhaps waiting for the avenging angel that bound him to this cave and promised on the hilt of a broken fang to restore the sanity to his soul. Sometimes, she wonders where that angel went, too. Probably lost in the descent somewhere, her wings clipped by the original sin, by the stain of lilac and lavender and other wretched vices dressed in pretty colors that only steal the red away. What she wouldn’t give to fly through skies that aren’t choked by an amaranthine storm (but it is _always_ storming).

Blood drips off the curve of his chin, paints dark rivulets down his throat. It drenches the length of her sleeve in the truth of her falsehood. Burgundy, in the end, is just another name for a tainted color. Kagome isn’t pure anymore, not like she used to be. Nothing pure stays.

Sighing, she leans down to press her forehead against his. Despite his growling, he doesn’t shy away or push her back, and she almost thinks he is mourning with her.

“I love you,” she murmurs, and knows that she means it, deep in her prelapsarian heart of hearts.

That’s perhaps the worst thing about love. It blazes like a flame that has never seen Hell, like a soul that has been tested by damnation and insists on finding Heaven in the madness. It is the burning shimmer of a sunrise, the slowing rhythm in the ears of those counting their last moments, the lifeblood pulsing proudly through the veins of the wrongfully condemned. It is an unbreakable scarlet string that binds two fated souls, unites them across the division of time and space and tragedy.

But it is still red, in the end—and nothing red remains red, here. It always becomes purple instead.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I wouldn't be me if I didn't write something dark and angsty. Needless to say, this was my favorite piece. Feel free to yell at me in the comment section.


End file.
